Return of Christian refugees remains uncertain

A bomb attack has been carried out against the chairperson of the church council of Midyat in south-east Turkey. The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) learned this on Tuesday from reliable sources in Tur Abdin. „The bomb was thrown on Saturday onto the court-yard of Yusuf Türker“, reported the GfbV Near-east correspondent Kamal Sido after the telephone call. „Fortunately it did not explode, otherwise the attack could have had fatal consequences.“ This attack is one of several attacks on Christians in south-east Turkey. The idea is to scare Assyro-Aramaean refugees to such an extent that they will be afraid to return to their native land.

Reporters on the spot surmise that the so-called „deep state“ (Turkish: derin devlet) is behind this new attack. An informal coalition of nationalistic politicians, judges, military and parts of the business world. It exercises influence on the so-called village protectors, who are supposed to fight as paramilitary units against the radical Kurd PKK who are seen next to the security forces as the greatest danger for the people in the region.

The most recent occasion was on 30^th August 2006, when an explosive was thrown against the house of Gebro Seven, who has been for many years the chairperson of the „Assyrian Mesopotamian Society of Augsburg“. In June and August 2006 there was a number if such attacks against houses and villages of the Assyro-Aramaeans in south-east Turkey.

„It is high time to finish with the system of suppression through the village protectors“, said the General Secretary of the GfbV, Tilman Zülch, in a letter to the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Ergogan. „These attacks threaten the cautious return of the national group to their native land after so many years. „Since the establishment of the system of the village protectors in 1985 hundreds of crimes, murders, rapes and cases of fraud or smuggling have taken place. Official sources state that there are at least 70,000 armed village protectors. They are still called in for military operations — also in north Iraq — although the armed conflict with the PKK has largely come to an end.

In 2003 already the most important Assyro-Aramaic organisations like the umbrella organisation of the development societies Tur Abdin (DETA), the European Syriac Union (ESU), the Assyrian Democratic Organisation — European Section (ADO), the Central Association of Assyrian Organisations in Germany and Central Europe (ZAVD) and the Union of Assyrian Suryoye Associations in Germany UASD) in an appeal to the Turkish government called for the abolition of the village protection system.

While in the middle of the 1960s there were only about 130,000 Assyro-Aramaeans in Tur Anbdin, today there are hardly more than 3000. The overwhelming majority of these Christians fled to Central and Northern Europe for fear of fanatical Muslims, but above all from the Kurdish village protection groups created by the Turkish military.